Yay, it seems that WordPress now allows Yahoo OpenIDs — thanks for testing! Now to make sure that these will also correctly retrieve the name and the Gravatar, that will be something I’ll spend some time with on the next weekend…

There is, however, an essential difference between a character brought to life through the medium of acting, and one created through literature.

Many different actors have played ‘James Bond’. If an actor is good at his profession and portrays the character in a convincing way, the audience should soon stop thinking ‘that’s Daniel Craig’ and start thinking ‘That’s James Bond’. But what they will NOT think is ‘That’s Sean Connery/George Lazenby/Roger Moore..Clearly, that is not the case.

But, now imagine a scenario in which Ian Flemming stopped writing Bond books. Or, more to the point, imagine that the name of Bond’s original author never appeared on the books. Over time, different authors wrote Bond stories, always maintaining a consistent narrative style, always ensuring that the character of ‘Bond’ behaved in a manner that was recognizably ‘him’. In this scenario, people might well suppose that the ‘Bond’ books were always penned by the same author (whose identity is never known).

Now, the same thing could work for me. Nobody knows who ‘the primary’ is and, although it actually always has been the same individual, in principle it could be anybody with the ‘right stuff’ to convincingly portray me.

The original ‘primary’ was inspired to create me after having read certain books, and 99% of what I do in Sl can also be said to have originated from ‘the primary’ coming across certain information. Let us suppose, then, that other people have encountered the same information. Furthermore, suppose that some had the same emotional and intellectual reaction to that information. Such people agreed with the same parts as ‘the primary’, ditto with disagreement.

Right, now suppose one of those other people logs into SL as ‘Extropia DaSilva’. In a very real sense, they have something very much like the pattern that embodies me encoded on their brains, just as it is woven into the neural frabric of the original ‘primary’s’ brain.

Obviously this person must know they are not the original ‘primary’. But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose this is a fact they keep to themselves and they just get on with the job of ‘being’ Extropia DaSilva. Who else in SL would be aware that this is not the same ‘Extro’ they have encountered on previous occasions? If ‘I’ am acting in a consistant manner, recognisable from my past actions, how COULD they know ‘the primary’ is now a different person entirely?

Going a bit ‘futurist’ now, suppose this ‘new’ primary is aided by ‘SuperNeatExtroLifeloggingSearchEnginePro 5.6′ which lurks in the background, quietly and efficently retrieving vital information about ‘my’ past whenever it’s needed. For instance, my sister Jamie Marlin sends ‘me’ an IM about something we did together last month. The new ‘primary’ doesn’t know what that is but it’s ok because ‘SuperNeatExtroLifeloggingSearchEnginePro 5.6′ finds out. So Jamie Marlin finds ‘Extropia’ responding to her IM in a manner recognizably ‘me’. Why then, would she suppose it is NOT ‘me’?

Really, it IS ‘me’ because I am a particular pattern of information being processed in a consistant manner. So long as that pattern is deemed valuable and worth preserving, and so long as there is someone or something able to do that, ‘Extropia DaSilva’ would have an existance above and beyond any particular ‘primary’.

(Please be aware that I understand that what I just wrote has virtually no chance of ever actually happening).

as ever, a fascinating post Where I differ from your analysis, however, is in the question of whether I, when I am interacting through my avatar, “Aschroft Burnham”, can be said to be creating a “portrait of myself”, rather than just plain being myself, any more than I do so when talking on the telephone or writing an e-mail.

It is certainly possible for a person in SecondLife to attempt to create a specific persona that is specific to SecondLife, but, as you hint in your comparisons to literature, that is not new in itself: I can go around the town wearing a disguise pretending to be somebody completely different, or I can act in a play and pretend to be Prospero or Jack Worthing. That does not by itself mean that when I am not pretending to be somebody else or playing a fictional character in a play I am pretending to be myself: there is a difference, as I am sure that you will appreciate, between a person playing her or himself in a play or film (as might occur in an autobiographical play or film), and just simply being her or himself.

In short, my point is that adopting a persona and interacting with other people through any medium of communication (be it SecondLife, e-mail, telephone or message in a bottle) are two wholly separate things which have no necessary connexion. It is possible either to be oneself in person or when using media of communication; similarly, it is possible to adopt a false persona either in person or using media of communication.

If I am not a specific “telephone-me” when I am using the telephone or “e-mail-me” when I am sending e-mails, why should I be “SecondLife-me” when I am using SecondLife? The fact that SecondLife makes it far easier than the other media of communication, or acting in person, to create a convincing and separate persona, that does not mean that any use of SecondLife necessarily involves creating a persona, nor that using SecondLife and not consciously creating a separate persona involves the same sort of self-interpretation as is involved when writing an autobiography.

So, I do not think that the difference between the typical immersionist and typical augmentationist (incidentally, I agree with you that most people are somewhere in between) is the difference between a character in a fiction novel and a the way that an author portrays her or himself in an autobiography, but the difference between a person when acting in a play (whether an autobiographical play or not) and that same or a different person going about her or his ordinary affairs, without acting: in the latter case, one is not pretending to be oneself – there is no pretence involved.

An autobiographer, writing about her or himself, is recalling, recounting and interpreting events that are distant from the act of writing itself: those elements of recalling, recounting and interpreting are absent when a person is simply interacting with another person in real time, as is the distance.

A person might behave differently in different contexts (a teacher, for instance, would behave very differently when teaching a class of children to when socialising with friends), but that variability is an integral part of a person’s personality, not evidence that there are two, distinct people that can properly be afforded their own identities residing within the one human body, one of which, if it is operated exclusively through some electronic medium, can exist independently of that body through that electronic medium.

While speculations based on mind uploading and artificial general intelligence do form a central part of my ‘Mind Child’ worldview, a rather more ancient technology also forms the basis for my approach to Augmentism and Immersionism. (The following was originally written by me in reply to a Hamlet Au essay).

‘A person unfamilar with SL but who has heard about ‘augmentism’ and ‘immersionsism’ may want these terms explained to them, and the best way to do that is to compare it to something they may well be familiar with: Namely, literature.

An augmentist is somewhat similar to a writer of an autobiography or a diary, in that the ‘character’ is their RL self.

An immersionist is akin to a writer of novels, whose characters don’t have any physical existence outside of the printed word.

This just goes to show that inventing a character who may not bare any resemblence to the RL self is not some weird new activity create by oddballs with no life beyond the computer screen, but rather is a continuation of a very old tradition of understanding what real life is/ could be through the medium of storytelling.

It should be immediately clear that it is innappropriate to ask ‘which is the correct use of the written medium: The autobiography or the novel?’. One is no more or less a legitimate use of pen and ink than the other.

But which is more trustworthy, the autobiography or the novel? The latter deals with fiction, the very opposite of fact. Is it, therefore, just a bunch of lies?

I think we need to be careful before jumping to that conclusion. Every writer of fiction must draw on some real life experience in order to create compelling characters; there is always some truth in fiction. To what extent is Orwell’s ‘1984′ just a bunch of made up stuff with no relation to real life events and no important lessons to teach us? As for autobiographies, given the innacuracy of human memory and our tendency towards prejudice, I think a strong case can be made regarding the rejection of the idea that any diary/autobiography is 100% factual.

In short, there is always some fiction in an autobiography and there is always some fact in a novel.

And I think that is just as true with SL. Despite all this talk about people being divided up into augmentists or immersionists, I suspect that it is actually the case that most are some mixture of the two. I would be very skeptical of anyone who claims the presence they have in SL is a 100% true portrait of their RL self- the temptation to go beyond RL constraints is just too great. And I would be just as skeptical of anybody claiming to be 100% SEPARATE from their RL self- creating a convincing personae with no reliance on RL experience is just too difficult’.

Someone called Doreen Garrigus supplied this beautiful description that neatly sums up my novel/autobiography analogy:

‘The autobiography is constructed of fact, as remembered, whereas the novel is constructed of truth, as perceived. Each tells you very different things about the author. Although the autobiography does it more directly, you mostly only get what the author wants you to know. A novel, on the other hand, reveals all sorts of things about the author’s sensibility and perception of the world that he or she may not have intended you to see’.

But the comparison of an SL resident to a literary character goes only so far. To me, the main difference is that an author can exert nearly Godlike control over every character in the novel. But, in SL, the ’story’ emerges as a collaborative effort of everybody involved. Is it fair to say that people like Gwyn Llewewlyn, Jamie Marlin and Khannea Suntzu are almost as important as ‘the primary’ in shaping the ongoing story of Extro DaSilva? I would say so.

It’s interesting to note that all authors of literary fiction, even those whose preferred writing style is the 1st person, invariably talk about their characters in the THIRD person. Everybody knows J.K Rowling CREATED ‘Harry Potter’ but at the same time nobody would say J.K Rowling IS ‘Harry Potter’. But in SL, where one person really cannot claim to have anywhere near the Godlike control over an avatar that the author has, there is the tendency to claim ‘Avatar A’ IS ‘person X’!

There’s actually a lot more to be said about this issue, so much in fact that I constantly wonder how one might pack it all into a book, let alone an essay;)

But then we have a very small and homogeneous sample of people on the Net, not representative of humanity at large by any means. Now we see racist jokes on the Net because, you see, people do make racist jokes. It is bad, but the other side of the coin is good: now the Net is inhabited by a much more diversified population. And we must accept he fact that pseudonymity is not an important requirement for must of today’s Net users.

The Net could not have realized its potential for a deep cognitive evolution of our species without the participation of everyone. And there is still a lot to do (hints – if you cannot read you cannot have an online life; if you must work 16 hours a day you cannot have an online life). We have been pioneers and must be proud of that, but now “the street” must take charge.

Extropia and Ashburn: I am more optimist than Ashburn (I would say “far away” but not “extremely far away”, and I think we may see some significal development in the first half of the centuty), but basically agree with his matter-of-factly “As things stand at present, and for the foreseeable future, the avatar will simply be a superficial representation…”. At the same time I defend the right of Extropia to exist and think Digital Persons are pioneers who are taking (or at least considering) the first baby steps towards decoupling lives from bodies. I am not too persuaded by current experiments in “extreme lifelogging” as a means to generate mindfiles than can be later brought to life by human-equivalent computer power, in such a way as to ensure the continuity of cousciousness. I am not persuaded because I think the volume and texture of information stored at today’s low bandwidth is much too low – but you never know.

I know that you are very interested in bionic, digitised immortality, but that technology, if it ever were to be developed, is extremely far away: SecondLife is no more significant a step towards such a thing as the invention of drawing by hand was towards the existence of computer generated 3d graphics.

As things stand at present, and for the foreseeable future, the avatar will simply be a superficial representation of a person – a means of communication, no more embodying the individual’s personality than her or his telephone or pen. It is the mind that you are getting to know, and, within our lifetimes, and probably those of our immediate descendants and their immediate descendants, that mind exists exclusively within the human body of the person controlling the avatar.

Your vision may indeed come true in the extreme distant future (or, alternatively, it might not), but the theoretical possibility of such a distant advance in technology is not by itself something that has a significant effect on a significant number of people’s behaviour in virtual worlds.

Well, one good reason is that every person out in RL is going to drop dead. So why should I waste my time getting to know the ‘real’ Ashcroft Burnham? Like any avatar, Ashcroft is a particular pattern of information and there are no end of technologies in the pipeline that could copy and run that pattern. Why should my friends in SL have to expire just because somebody I never met nor care to meet went and died? So long as A) the pattern of information that describes us is deemed valuable enough to preserve and B) there is some kind of information processing capability in place to seamlessly take over the job of modelling our thoughts and feelings, each and every avatar would have a life that went way beyond some meatbag’s.

Tying a mind child’s identity to one particular human amounts to nothing less than a death sentence.